Recommendations
Books Like Infinite Jest
Best books to read after Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is the most ambitious American novel of the 1990s — 1,100 pages, endnotes, tennis, addiction, entertainment. These recommendations continue the Wallace canon, explore the postmodern American fiction tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the maximalist novel of American culture.
- 1Buy
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
by David Foster Wallace
The essential DFW essays — 'E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,' the cruise ship essay, the tennis essays, essential context for understanding what Infinite Jest is doing and the best introduction to Wallace's nonfiction voice.
- 2Buy
The Pale King
by David Foster Wallace
The posthumous unfinished novel — IRS examiners in Peoria, Illinois, a meditation on boredom and attention that extends Infinite Jest's concerns while being more accessible and more formally coherent in its individual sections.
- 3Buy
Consider the Lobster
by David Foster Wallace
The second essential DFW essays — 'Consider the Lobster,' 'Up, Simba,' 'How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,' Wallace at his most politically and morally direct.
- 4Buy
White Noise
by Don DeLillo
The DeLillo novel that most directly anticipates Infinite Jest — Jack Gladney confronting death and consumer culture, DeLillo's examination of American distraction as a companion to Wallace's more comprehensive and more personal treatment.
- 5Buy
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
The companion Great American Novel of the decade — the Lambert family and American domestic life, Franzen's more accessible treatment of what Infinite Jest attacks at scale, his friendship with Wallace shaping the novel.
- 6Buy
Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
The postmodern predecessor — Tyrone Slothrop in WWII Europe, Pynchon's maximalist historical novel as the primary literary predecessor to Infinite Jest's scale and ambition.
- 7Buy
The Recognitions
by William Gaddis
The other great maximalist American novel — Wyatt Gwyon's art forgeries, Gaddis's 956-page modernist novel as the precursor to both Pynchon and Wallace in the tradition of the ambitious, difficult American novel.
- 8Buy
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
by David Foster Wallace
The DFW story collection — 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,' 'Octet,' 'The Depressed Person,' the shorter fiction that shows the same technical range as Infinite Jest in more concentrated form.
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